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Houston Stewart Chamberlain
(September 9, 1855 – January 9, 1927) was a British-born author of
books on political philosophy, natural science and Richard Wagner.
Chamberlain married the composer's daughter some years after
Wagner's death. His two-volume book, Die Grundlagen des
neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (The Foundations Of The Nineteenth
Century), published in 1899, became one of the many references for
the pan-Germanic movement of the early 20th century, and, later, of
the antisemitism of Nazi racial philosophy.

Early life

Houston Stewart Chamberlain was born
in Southsea, Hampshire, England. His mother, Eliza Jane, daughter of
Captain Basil Hall, R.N., died before he was a year old, and he was
raised by his grandmother in France.

Chamberlain's education began in a
Lycée at Versailles and most of his education occurred on the
continent, but his father, Rear Admiral William Charles Chamberlain,
had planned a military career for his son and at 11 he was sent to
Cheltenham College, a public school which produced many military
officers. [1] The young Chamberlain was "a compulsive dreamer" more
interested in the arts than the military and he developed a fondness
for nature and a near-mystical sense of self. [2] The prospect of
serving as an officer in India or elsewhere in the British Empire
held no attraction for him. In addition, he was a delicate child
with poor health. At the age of 14 he had to be withdrawn from
school.

He then traveled to various spas
around Europe, accompanied by a Prussian tutor, Herr Otto Kuntze,
who taught him German and interested him in German culture and
history. Chamberlain then went to Geneva, where he studied under
Carl Vogt, (a supporter of racial typology at the University of
Geneva) [3] Graebe, Müller Argoviensis, Thury, Plantamour, and other
professors. He studied systematic botany, geology, astronomy, and
later the anatomy and physiology of the human body. [4]

Thereafter he migrated to Dresden,
where "he plunged heart and soul into the mysterious depths of
Wagnerian music and philosophy, the metaphysical works of the Master
probably exercising as strong an influence upon him as the musical
dramas." [4] Chamberlain was immersed in philosophical writings, and
became a Völkisch author, one of those who were concerned more with
art, culture, civilization and spirit than with quantitative
physical distinctions between groups. [5] This is evidenced by
his huge treatise on Immanuel Kant with its comparisons. His
knowledge of Friedrich Nietzsche is demonstrated in that work
(p. 183) and Foundations (p. 153n). By this time Chamberlain had met
his first wife, the Prussian Anna Horst, whom he was to divorce in
1905.[6]

Later years

In 1889 he moved to Austria. During
this time it is said his ideas on race began taking shape,
influenced by the concept of Teutonic supremacy embodied in the
works of Wagner and Arthur de Gobineau. [7]

Chamberlain had attended Wagner's
Bayreuth Festival in 1882 and struck up a close correspondence with
his wife Cosima. In 1908 he married Eva Wagner, the composer's
daughter, and the next year he moved to Germany and became an
important member of the "Bayreuth Circle" of German nationalist
intellectuals.

By the time World War I broke out in
1914, Chamberlain remained an Englishman only by virtue of his name
and nationality. In 1916 he also acquired German citizenship. He had
already begun propagandising on behalf of the German government and
continued to do so throughout the war. His vociferous denunciations
of his land of birth, it has been posited, [8] were the culmination
of his rejection of his native England's capitalism, in favour of a
form of German Romanticism akin to that he had cultivated in himself
during his years at Cheltenham. Chamberlain received the Iron Cross
from the Kaiser, with whom he was in regular correspondence, in
1916. [9]

Death

After the war Chamberlain's
chronically bad health took a turn for the worse and he was left
partially paralyzed; he continued living in Bayreuth until his death
in 1927. [10] [11]

Writings

Natural science

Houston Stewart Chamberlain

Under the tutelage of Professor
Julius von Wiesner of the University of Vienna, Chamberlain studied
botany in Geneva, earning a Bacheliers en sciences physiques et
naturelles in 1881. His thesis, Recherches sur la sève ascendante
(Studies on rising sap), was not finished until 1897 and did not
culminate in a degree. [12] The main thrust of his dissertation
is that the vertical transport of fluids in vascular plants via
xylem cannot be explained by the fluid mechanical theories of the
time, but only by the existence of a "vital force" (force vitale)
that is beyond the pale of physical measurement. He summarizes
his thesis in the Introduction:

Without the participation of
these vital functions it is quite simply impossible for water to
rise to heights of 150 feet, 200 feet and beyond, and all the
efforts that one makes to hide the difficulties of the problem
by relying on confused notions drawn from physics are little
more reasonable than the search for the philosopher's stone.
[13]

Physical arguments, in particular
transpirational pull and root pressure, have since been shown to be
adequate for explaining the ascent of sap. [14]

He was an early supporter of Hans
Hörbiger's Welteislehre, the theory that most bodies in our solar
system are covered with ice. Due in part to Chamberlain's advocacy,
this became official cosmological dogma during the Third Reich.
[15]

Chamberlain's attitude towards the
natural sciences was somewhat ambivalent and contradictory - he
later wrote: "one of the most fatal errors of our time is that which
impels us to give too great weight to the so-called 'results' of
science."[16] Still, his scientific credentials were often cited by
admirers to give weight to his political philosophy.[4]

Chamberlain rejected Darwinism,
evolution and social Darwinism and instead emphasized "gestalt"
which he said derived from Goethe. Chamberlain said that Darwinism
was the most abominable and misguided doctrine of the day. [17]

Richard Wagner

Chamberlain was an admirer of Richard
Wagner, and wrote several commentaries on his works including Notes
sur Lohengrin ("Notes on Lohengrin") (1892), an analysis of Wagner's
drama (1892), and a biography (1895), emphasizing in particular the
heroic Teutonic aspects in the composer's works. [18] Stewart
Spencer, writing in Wagner Remembered, [19] described Chamberlain's
edition of Wagner letters as "one of the most egregious attempts in
the history of musicology to misrepresent an artist by
systematically censoring his correspondence."

Die Grundlagen (The Foundations)

In 1899 Chamberlain wrote his most
important work, Die Grundlagen des Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, in
German. The work said that Western civilization is deeply marked by
the influence of Teutonic peoples. Chamberlain grouped all
European peoples — not just Germans, but Celts, Slavs, Greeks, and
Latins — as well as Berbers from North Africa [20] into the "Aryan
race," a race built on the ancient Proto-Indo-European culture. At
the helm of the Aryan race, and, indeed, all races, were the Nordic
or Teutonic peoples.

The Foundations sold well: eight
editions and 60,000 copies within 10 years, 100,000 copies by the
outbreak of World War I and 24 editions and more than a quarter of a
million copies by 1938. [21]

Other

During World War I, Chamberlain
published several propaganda texts against his country of origin —
Kriegsaufsätze (Wartime Essays). In the first four tracts, he
maintains that Germany is a nation of peace; England's political
system is a sham, while Germany exhibits true freedom; German is the
greatest and only remaining "living" language; and the world
would be better off doing away with English and French-styled
parliamentary governments in favor of German rule "thought out by a
few and carried out with iron consequence." The final two
discuss England and Germany at length. [22]

The impact of The Foundations

During his lifetime Chamberlain's
works were read widely throughout Europe, and especially in Germany.
His reception was particularly favorable among Germany's
conservative elite. Kaiser Wilhelm II patronized Chamberlain,
maintaining a correspondence, inviting him to stay at his court,
distributing copies of The Foundations Of The Nineteenth Century
among the German army, and seeing that The Foundations was carried
in German libraries and included in the school curricula. [7]
[23]

The Foundations would prove to be
a seminal work in German nationalism; due to its success, aided
by Chamberlain's association with the Wagner circle, its ideas of
Aryan supremacy and a struggle against Jewish influence spread
widely across the German state at the beginning of the century. If
it did not form the framework of later National Socialist ideology,
at the very least it provided its adherents with a seeming
intellectual justification. [24]

Chamberlain himself lived to see his
ideas begin to bear fruit. Adolf Hitler, while still growing as a
political figure in Germany, visited him several times (in 1923 and
in 1926, together with Joseph Goebbels) at the Wagner family's
property in Bayreuth. [23] Chamberlain, paralyzed and despondent
after Germany's losses in World War I, wrote to Hitler after his
first visit in 1923:

Most respected and dear Hitler,
... It is hardly surprising that a man like that can give peace
to a poor suffering spirit! Especially when he is dedicated to
the service of the fatherland. My faith in Germandom has not
wavered for a moment, though my hopes were - I confess - at a
low ebb. With one stroke you have transformed the state of my
soul. That Germany, in the hour of her greatest need, brings
forth a Hitler - that is proof of her vitality ... that the
magnificent Ludendorff openly supports you and your movement:
What wonderful confirmation! I can now go untroubled to sleep...
May God protect you! [23]

Chamberlain joined the Nazi Party
and contributed to its publications. Its primary journal, the
Völkischer Beobachter dedicated five columns to praising him on his
70th birthday, describing The Foundations as the "gospel of the Nazi
movement." [25]

Hitler later attended Chamberlain's
funeral in January 1927 along with several highly ranked members of
the Nazi party. [26] Chamberlain's ideas were influential in
particular to Alfred Rosenberg, who became the Nazi Party's in-house
philosopher. In 1909, some months before his 17th birthday, he
went with an aunt to visit his guardian, where several other
relatives were gathered. Bored, he went to a book shelf, picked up a
copy of Chamberlain's The Foundations and wrote of the moment: "I
felt electrified; I wrote down the title and went straight to the
bookshop." In 1930 Rosenberg published The Myth Of The Twentieth
Century, a homage to and continuation of Chamberlain's work. [27]
Rosenberg had accompanied Hitler when he called upon Wagner's widow,
Cosima, in October 1923 where he met her son-in-law. He told the
ailing Chamberlain he was working on his own new book which, he
intended, should do for the Third Reich what Chamberlain's book had
done for the Second. [28]

Beyond the Kaiser and the NSDAP,
assessments were mixed. The French Germanic scholar Edmond Vermeil
considered Chamberlain's ideas "essentially shoddy," but the
anti-Nazi German author Konrad Heiden, despite objections to
Chamberlain's racial ideas, described him as "one of the most
astonishing talents in the history of the German mind, a mine of
knowledge and profound ideas."[29]

Works

Notes sur Lohengrin (his first
published work), Dresden.

Das Drama Richard Wagners, 1892.

Recherches sur La Seve Ascendante,
Neuchâtel, 1897.

The Life of Wagner, Munich, 1897,
translated into English by G. Ainslie Hight.

Grundlagen des Neunzehnten
Jahrhunderts, 1899.

The Foundations of the Nineteenth
Century, translated into English from the German by John Lees,
M.A., D.Lit.,(Edinburgh) with an extensive "Introduction" by
Lord Redesdale, The Bodley Head, London, 4th English language
reprint, 1913, (2 volumes).

Immanuel Kant - a study and a
comparison with Goethe, Leonardo da Vinci, Bruno, Plato and
Descartes, the authorised translation into English from the
German by Lord Redesdale, with his "Introduction", The Bodley
Head, London, 1914, (2 volumes).

"The noble Moor of Spain is
anything but a pure Arab of the desert, he is half a Berber
(from the Aryan family) and his veins are so full of Gothic
blood that even at the present day noble inhabitants of Morocco
can trace their descent back to Teutonic ancestors.", Houston
Stewart Chamberlain, The Foundations of the 19th Century (1899),
Adamant Media Corporation, 2005, p.398, chap.5

Shirer, William L. The Rise and
Fall of the Third Reich, 1959, p.107 of 1985 Bookclub Associates
Edition.

Chamberlain, Houston Stewart, The
Ravings of a Renegade: Being the War Essays of Houston Stewart
Chamberlain. Translated with a Preface by Charles H. Clark,
PhD., and an Introduction by Lewis Melville, Jarrold and Sons,
London, 1915.

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